The present embodiments relate to automated determination of a gap in care for one or more patients.
With the advent of the Meaningful Use regulation in the United States, providers (e.g., hospitals and physicians) are incentivized to switch from paper based systems for keeping medical information to Electronic Medical Records (EMR). However, this clinical data resides in many forms, such as labs, progress notes, discharge summaries, medication records, allergy tables, or other data sources, with significant differences between different providers or EMR vendors. This variability is the source of significant inefficiencies in the way data is made available for different applications, such as quality reporting or care management. In some cases, to deal with these differences, providers spend extra money to implement point-to-point, provider specific, bridges (e.g., data extraction and transformation interfaces) between each data source and each application. In other cases, an application is not able to deal with various types of data, resulting in incomplete and potentially inaccurate data that feeds into the decision making process.
Due to the above challenges, there is an increase in both true cost of ownership and time to value for the solutions present at a hospital or physician practice. Moreover, providers with lower budgets may be deterred from purchasing various solutions to relate one type of data to another. The patients may ultimately be affected too by a lack of bridging between diverse data formats. Without sufficient information from the various data sources, a gap in care for a patient or patients may not be identified in an automated process to back-stop a medical professional.